Colin Johanson Takes to Forums to Allay Concerns

Arena.Net's Colin Johanson has taken to the Guild Wars 2 forums to talk with players about concerns and misconceptions that are being discussed regarding this week's "quality of life" update, most specifically about the new player experience. In the post, Johanson acknowledges some oversights and bugs that are currently being ironed out, and addresses the notion that the new player experience is properly designed to give new players a good sense of progression and reward.

Not all of these changes were made as ways to teach the game, some of them are to provide a better sense of pacing, reward and progression. Early on we want to give a sense that you’re rapidly gaining new abilities, rewards, and learning new things as you level up. We added the level up reward messages, and the actual rewards themselves, and took abilities you’d usually use around that point in total game hours and presented them as unlocks (or things we teach that are already unlocked) to help give a better sense of pacing and progression.

With the addition of the new rewards, messaging, and level up screen to make leveling more exciting: we also wanted to make sure you had that feeling of excitement more often early on in the game, and presented new learning on a more regular cadence. So we greatly sped up leveling from levels 1-15. Many of the things unlocked at later levels are earned at about the same time period you used to start using them in the old system in actual real game time, we just staggered them out across the levels since we sped up leveling to make the game feel more rewarding early on.